YouTube Engineering and Developers Blog: custom player

Engineering and Developers Blog

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Sunsetting the Custom Player

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

YouTube previously offered a specialized way of embedding playlists (as well as uploads and favorites feeds) for playback on third party sites in a customizable interface—we called this the Custom Player. While the Custom Player had its fans, it never saw a great deal of usage, and we recently removed support for the creation of new Custom Players. If you’ve already created a Custom Player and have it embedded on your site it should continue to work as-is; the only thing that has changed is that new Custom Players cannot be created.

One common concern is that owners cannot update the videos featured in existing Custom Players. We recommend that you update the associated playlist to reflect the videos that you would like to feature in the Custom Player, or embed a new playlist.

While we will not allow for the creation of new custom players at this time, similar functionality is available through creating embedded playlists, which can be accessed by visiting http://youtube.com/my_playlists, clicking Share, and then using the embed code given there.

We apologize that taking away the ability to create new Custom Players caught anyone off guard. Stay tuned to this blog for upcoming announcements about modern alternatives to the Custom Player—we’ve got some exciting things in store!

Cheers,
—David Boyle, YouTube Team